The current study examines individual judges' punishment decisions and sentencing patterns within court communities. Focal concerns perspective states that judges consider offender blameworthiness, community threat, and practical constraints when sentencing offenders, and assessment of the focal concerns is likely to vary across judges. In part, differences are due to judges' subjective decision-making, but additional theories suggest sentencing outcomes are also influenced by the court community in which punishment decisions occur. Extant research generally relies on multilevel models to assess interjudge variation, but more recent work indicates multilevel analysis obscures variation at the judge-level, and provides limited information about how individual judges within court communities consider offender and case characteristics. The current work offers a more comprehensive examination of interjudge disparity and judicial sentencing patterns within court communities. The research uses seven years (2004-2010) of data collected from the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing and a sample of large, medium, and small courts. Findings from multilevel models and individual judge regression models show individual judge analyses provide a better understanding of variation across judges, and whether differences associated with key predictors of punishment are meaningful. The current research also finds little consistency in the ways judges in the same court communities consider extralegal factors in sentencing decisions. This work highlights the need to further develop theories to explain why offender and case characteristics influence punishment decisions for some judges, but not others, and the role court communities play in sentencing decisions.
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